


The Old Songs

by koldtblod



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Gen, I'll never be over it, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 13:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6959545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koldtblod/pseuds/koldtblod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl has never really appreciated Beth's singing, but just for once, he thinks he might understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Songs

**Author's Note:**

> I love everything about the piano scene in _Alone_ , but it also really winds me that it's so short. This was originally this was written as part of a short series, but a lot of it remains unfinished due to work commitments and so I just decided I'd post this as a stand-alone.

   Beth sang like an angel, Daryl thought for the first time, as he lay back in that damn coffin and listened to her play the piano. For the first time, yes he, Daryl Dixon, was enjoying her music. And it was strange to admit that.

   The songs used to annoy him, Daryl remembered. The irritation at her naivety crept up inside him all the quicker whenever the girl would sit down around the fire and her Daddy would give her that smile, and she’d just start singing like the world hadn’t gone to shit and everything was fine. The songs annoyed him, Daryl knew, because she had a grip on something that he couldn’t figure out.

   The words to this song were cutesy, the topic like something a lovesick college girl would sing about before the end of everything; something about a summertime romance and drinking beer, and we’ll be good, something like that. Daryl figured it must be her own song because it suited her voice, or maybe she’d just reworked it because he’d certainly never heard it before – but then, he reasoned, he’d never really heard a lot of songs. He knew the old 40s tunes that his Ma had played on her second-hand record player, and Daryl also knew the redneck tunes that they favoured at the bar and the heavy rock that Merle listened to in his truck. He didn’t know this one though, not even close. But it was pretty, he supposed, or rather Beth’s voice was pretty and he allowed the sound of both to lull him into a trance, staring at the ceiling.

   It was strange, he guessed, to think about Beth now – strong in a way that he figured a person could never be strong. To him, before, strong would never have been a pretty girl with a pretty voice singing and playing the piano at the end of all things, trying to hold on to the good. He’d mocked her that night when they’d been drunk; called it naïve like he’d thought her songs, called it attention-seeking and dumb and everything else that went along. But truthfully it wasn’t any of that. Beth had seen both sides, too. And Daryl had been so busy fighting his own demons that he had not stopped for a moment to consider that, somehow, this girl who sat and played the piano now in front of him, for him, might have been a saviour because of all the reasons that Daryl thought she couldn’t. Beth had been an awful lot of things, he thought, and dealt with her own share of what this world had to offer, but she’d never let herself be dragged down at the same time, and maybe that was it. Beth still had the sunlight shining out of her eyes when she smiled. Slowly, Daryl blinked.

   The piano had stopped playing, he realised presently, when after a moment the silence of the evening seemed to come back into the room. He was warm there, in the cushy bed of the coffin, but Beth had stopped singing and he lifted his head an inch to peer properly over the side at her.

   “What?” he asked.

   A pause, and then she said, “I don’t remember any other old songs.” She still sat facing the piano, eyes turned down to her fingers splayed over the keys as if she was trying, and trying hard, to remember where to place them.

   Daryl had never learnt to play the piano, although they’d had one at his elementary school for a short time tucked up in the corner of the hall. He’d never learnt to play anything, in fact, and never really had much of an urge to do so anyway. He did however had hazy memories of Merle, when they were both much younger, coming home with a battered six-string guitar and presenting it to their Ma as if it were made of pure gold. He knew then as he remembered now that it had been an ugly, beaten-up old thing, but their Ma had loved it and she and Merle had sat by the window with it until, after dark, a truck rumbled back into the driveway and heavy shoes hit the compact mud outside the door.

   It had been sold in the end, like everything else, to one of Merle’s conspicuous friends to help pay off a debt that he owed them. It had only been played the one time as well, on that afternoon when their Ma was still alive. Merle trying, and so desperately to please her, to pluck out the tunes of Johnny Cash songs one after the other on that guitar now seemed ridiculous to Daryl, especially after all that had happened. But he remembered his Ma’s throaty laughter and voice roughened by alcohol and years of chain-smoking as she sang, as slowly as Merle played, along to her favourites.

   “That sounded good ‘nough to me,” he grunted, before laying his head back down again.

   “I meant the other ones,” Beth said. “Other songs.”

   “Oh.”

   “But… I could teach you something, if you wanted...”

   It wasn’t really a question, Daryl gathered. Sure, if he said no, she’d accept his choice; maybe carry on trying to remember her songs, play something else, talk about the weather. But if he said yes… Daryl wet the roof of his mouth a couple of times, running it over in his head. When he looked up, Beth’s face was pointed towards him, and that was all he had.

   “I can’t carry a tune,” he said wearily, bracing himself as he clambered up.

   Beth just giggled, her cheeks gleaming in the candlelight. “I can sing for both of us!” she said.

   “Al’ight.”

   Daryl let himself be guided after that – into the seat beside her that was barely wide enough for both of them, and out of his shell, and he tried to stop thinking about all the reasons why this was a bad idea.   He felt like a child as he sat there, as if his clothes were too big and he didn’t quite fit, a bit awkward and clumsy as his hands tried to copy Beth’s, but covered too many keys at the same time and couldn’t quite get it. But even so, he watched the sides of her mouth quirk up when he did, and Daryl found that he could copy her smile without trying. They played Waltzing Matilda very gradually, with her hands on one side of the piano and his on the other, messing up, but getting there – gradually. It felt like everything else did around Beth.

   This was her, slowly but surely, teaching him how to remember the good. It wasn’t a lesson in piano, not really, although she kept repeating the notes to him as she pressed her fingers down and let the sound ring, but it wasn’t really, _really_ about the music. This was Beth teaching him to breathe again. This was the good in all of the bad. Daryl’s shoulder bumped into hers.

   “Like this,” she said gently, smiling as she moved her hand into a new position.

   Daryl tried to copy her. He thought – about this version of Beth, and the younger, weaker Beth that he had first met, who had tried to cut her wrists open in the bathroom of the house and cried when Maggie had burst through the door to stop her. His eyes, of their own accord, sought out the thin slither of a scar between the bracelets on her arm.

   “You know the words, right?” she asked then, and Daryl jerked his head back up. “You’re doing good.”

   “Only the chorus,” he shrugged, but as usual Beth just smiled and altered the position of her hands, and Daryl somehow seemed to understand and did the same with his.

“Then sing the chorus with me,” she said. They began at the start all over again.

   She hadn’t changed all that much, Daryl knew. He stared at his hands moving, still awkwardly and slowly, over the keys and thought about all the things that he still did to himself – all the _pain_ that he still inflicted upon himself – even as he criticised her for doing the same thing just once. He listened to Beth’s singing and forced himself to join in, despite the cracks in his voice, and he thought about Merle and his Ma, and about the six-string guitar that they’d sang along to years ago for the same purpose of comfort. There was no way, ever, that Beth would have known about that and yet somehow, she’d still managed to tap in.

   Their rendition was, perhaps, the most simplistic, bare-rooted version of the song that Daryl had ever heard, and was of course interrupted here and there with a bum note on his behalf but overall… overall, it was good. Beth made people see the good. She was still in many ways the young girl from the farm, but that was exactly it; that was why, in the end, she was the silver lining, the slither of sunlight, and the proof that the whole world wasn’t ready to die. The song finished, and Daryl let his hands fall back down to his lap, and Beth looked at him with the same sunlight that she always did. There was a lot going on, he knew that. But Daryl was happy, he supposed, that he was here with her after everything that had happened, and not someone else.

   Tentatively, he smiled at her. The candlelight caught in her hair, and on her cheeks again, and with a laugh that warmed some strange, closed-off part in his chest, Beth smiled right back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, reviewing, and etc. Of course, the song that they're playing is the Australian 'bush ballad' of Waltzing Matilda, that's been covered and included in other songs so many times. My favourite rendition is naturally Tom Waits' [Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkOMiA_uGso), so give it a cheeky listen if you're feeling inclined! And yeah, Beth is initially singing the Emily Kinney version of the song, [Be Good](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVudemQmgYM), as featured in the show.


End file.
